Early and Middle Woodland Landscapes of the Southeast

Alice P. Wright

Publication Year: 2013

The Early and Middle Woodland periods (1000 BCE-500 CE) were remarkable for their level of culture contact and interaction in pre-Columbian North America. This volume, featuring case studies from Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, and Tennessee, sheds new light on the various approaches to the study of the dynamic and complex social landscapes of these eras. Essays by well-known and up-and-coming scholars incorporate empirical data with social organizational concepts such as ritual, cultural, and social places, highlighting the variability and common themes in the relationships between people, landscapes, and the built environment that characterize this period of North American native life.

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Emerging Approaches to the Landscapes of the Early and Middle Woodland Southeast

On a pleasantly balmy morning in November 2009, several dozen archaeologists
crowded into a small conference room in Mobile, Alabama, to hear
David Anderson and Kenneth Sassaman comment on the current state of archaeological
research in the American Southeast. Their paper, now expanded
into a book (Anderson and Sassaman 2012), covered considerable topical,...

Part 1. Extensive Landscapes: Between and Beyond Monuments

2. The Early–Middle Woodland Domestic Landscape in Kentucky

Archaeological studies of the Early–Middle Woodland subperiods in Kentucky
have long been associated with research on Adena, an archaeological
culture best known for earthwork construction and elaborate mortuary ritual.
Since the 1930s, archaeologists have made great progress in understanding
the Adena ritual landscape, including recent studies of developmental trajectories...

3. The Adena Mortuary Landscape: Off-Mound Rituals and Burial Mounds

The central Kentucky Adena mortuary landscape comprised burial mounds
(Applegate 2008; Clay, chapter 4, this volume; Henry, chapter 15, this volume)
and off-mound ritual localities. Mounds ranged in height from less
than 50 cm to more than 30 m. Small, low-lying mounds would have been
used once for a single interment, while large, taller mounds would have...

4. Like a Dead Dog: Strategic Ritual Choice in the Mortuary Enterprise

My deliberately provocative title is an attempt to move archaeological discourse
away from more predictable, Western-oriented channels toward those
that might be novel yet informative. It is taken from the words of a coastal
New Guinea informant commenting on the “correctness” of a mortuary ritual
sequence he had witnessed. In Tok Pidgin, his words were “Ol e troim wey nating...

5. The Early and Middle Woodland of the Upper Cumberland Plateau, Tennessee

In this chapter, we address Early and Middle Woodland landscape use on
the Upper Cumberland Plateau (UCP) of Tennessee. In keeping with this
volume’s perspectives on social landscapes, we consider how the residues
of various technological processes—raw material procurement, stone tool
production, ceramic manufacture, and obtaining and processing subsistence

Part 2. Monumental Landscapes: Mound and Earthwork Sites

6. Winchester Farm: A Small Adena Enclosure in Central Kentucky

Earthen constructions of various sizes and shapes have attracted the attention
of people interested in the prehistoric remains of the middle Ohio River valley
for over 200 years. In fact, in 1803, Meriwether Lewis described the celebrated
Grave Creek mound on the Ohio River in West Virginia as a “remarkable
artificial mound of earth” encompassed by a wide ditch. The mound was...

The social landscapes of the Middle Woodland Southeast comprised a variety
of culturally meaningful places, from camp sites and settlements to
burial grounds and ceremonial centers. Historically, these latter constituents
of the landscape, often consisting of monumental mounds and earthworks,
have undergone the most intensive archaeological investigation. Thanks to...

8. Biltmore Mound and the Appalachian Summit Hopewell

Hopewellian ceremonies of the Appalachian Summit were undoubtedly varied
and undertaken at a variety of locations across the landscape. However,
it can be argued that only Garden Creek Mound No. 2 (31Hw2—Keel 1976;
Wright, chapter 7, this volume) and Biltmore Mound (31Bn174—Kimball
et al. 2010) are documented Hopewellian/Connestee phase mound sites in
western North Carolina. Both have single mounds placed adjacent to...

9. The Woodland Period Cultural Landscape of the Leake Site Complex

Although it was occupied for approximately one millennium, from circa 300
BC to AD 650, the Leake site developed over a short period of time from a local
domestic occupation early in its history into a large Hopewellian ceremonial
and interaction center, which concomitantly served as a gateway community
that geographically and culturally linked the Southeast and the Midwest...

10. The Creation of Ritual Space at the Jackson Landing Site in Coastal Mississippi

A defining trait of many Middle and Late Woodland societies across the
Eastern Woodlands was the construction and use of various forms of monumental
architecture (Anderson and Mainfort 2002a: 10–13; Carr and Case
2005c; Griffin 1967: 186; Knight 2001: 313; Mainfort and Sullivan 1998: 4;
Steponaitis 1986: 379). In many locations, Woodland architects used culturally...

Part 3. Landscapes of Interaction

11. Late Middle Woodland Settlement and Ritual at the Armory Site

The scale of interregional interaction in the Eastern Woodlands during the
Middle Woodland period is generally thought to surpass that of any preceding
prehistoric period. Characteristic of this interaction was the exchange of
exotic materials and the sharing of ideas regarding the production of material
culture, mound building, and mortuary ceremonialism (Chase 1998; Griffin...

12. Constituting Similarity and Difference in the Deep South: The Ritual and Domestic Landscapes of Kolomoki, Crystal River, and Fort Center

Archaeological studies of the Woodland period societies of eastern North
America have undergone a renaissance in recent years, with the appearance
of a number of ambitious syntheses (Byers 2004; Carr and Case 2005a; Case
and Carr 2008; Charles and Buikstra 2006; Romain 2009). The vast majority
of this work, however, has focused on Middle Woodland societies in the...

13. Ritual Life and Landscape at Tunacunnhee

As demonstrated by the chapters of this volume, Early and Middle Woodland
ritual landscapes are variable and dynamic throughout Eastern North America.
Our analyses of these phenomena, however, are uneven, because interpretations
of landscapes result not only from local culture histories but also
from our various academic backgrounds and theoretical persuasions....

14. Swift Creek and Weeden Island Mortuary Landscapes of Interaction

Middle Woodland burial mounds in the lower Southeast were the ritualized
locations for mortuary ceremonies and periodic population aggregation that
probably included various other events. While there is some variation in the
form and apparent function of these burial mounds, most mounds evidence
a degree of social connection that extends beyond typical contemporaneous...

15. Working Out Adena Political Organization and Variation from the Ritual Landscape in the Kentucky Bluegrass

This chapter examines the distribution of structural variation in Adena mortuary
ritual and burial practices across three subregions of the Kentucky
Bluegrass: the Northern Bluegrass, Central Bluegrass, and Eastern Bluegrass
(Pollack 2008). This study is used as a foundation to conceptualize Adena
leadership as situational and heterarchical in nature (Abrams and Le Rouge...

Part 4. Woodland Landscapes in Historical and Regional Perspective

16. On Ceremonial Landscapes

This volume bears testimony to the growing evidence that landscape approaches
in archaeology offer a very productive route to uncovering unexpected
expressions of ritual practice found on sites of the Early and Middle
Woodland periods. Ritual has been associated with the Middle Woodland
period since the days of Squier and Davis (1848), when they identified...

17. Social Landscapes of Early and Middle Woodland Peoples in the Southeast

Exciting and important things were happening during the Early and Middle
Woodland periods in the Southeast, the interval from roughly 3,200 to 1,500
calendar years ago, as made clearer by the chapters in this volume. In any region
where a vast amount of fieldwork and data collection has been occurring,
as has been the case for many decades in the Southeast, there is a continual...

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